My wish is to simply do a feasibility study of sorts to see whether a bare minimum version could be developed to aid research and the student-faculty-institution relationships.

How many times do we forget what we did, when we did it, and why? A blog is enough for much of this, but would ideally want to add media such as plots/pdfs. But there are software companies doing this as full-time jobs so a minimal product is likely sufficient to start.